Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Slowly and steadily, for those who have been paying attention, French filmmaker Bertrand Mandico and Romanian-American actor Elina Löwensohn have become one of the most consistently productive and unrelentingly original collaborative teams working in cinema today.

Starfish is a monster film like no other; it eschews the big budget spectacle so often associated with the category to focus instead on a deep, symbolic introspection. It wears its low-budget indie credentials as a badge of honor as it traverses terrain as much psychological as geographic.

Both vicious and joyful, nostalgic and distinctly contemporary, Knife+Heart is above all else unapologetic in the multiple excesses that mark this defiant project of queer genre filmmaking. Vanessa Paradis has for decades demonstrated time and time again an impressive range in her craft, but it is most recently in Yann Gonzalez’s slick neo-giallo Knife+Heart that her unparalleled screen presence has been most effectively utilized.

I’ve learned in that time that ‘feminism’ means different things to different people and that this diversity is important. I like ‘feminisms’ plural because it allows different positions to co-exist and be debated and so I don’t sound like I am shouting anyone down I tend to describe my work as ‘interested in gender politics’ rather than feminist because the latter can be read in so many different ways. In short, therefore, feminism is the belief that gender difference relates to power in a way that predominantly favors men, and marks a desire to interrogate that with a focus on change.

With its world premiere at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Australian filmmaker Luke Sullivan may have found himself a long way from home geographically with his sophomore feature Reflections in the Dust, but the film itself is far more closely aligned to European art cinema traditions than what might be more immediately thought of as ‘typical’ Australian cinema.

30 Miles from Nowhere is the perfect combination of familiar, comfortable genre codes and conventions given a fun twist, resulting in thoroughly enjoyable viewing experience. It is the perfect popcorn-friendly horror movie – fun, full of energy, self-aware but never smug, and fresh enough to keep its audience wondering.

In Australia, Dee McLachlan’s The Wheel, filmed primarily at Melbourne’s Dockland Studios, takes the director of 2007’s acclaimed movie about human trafficking The Jammed to new territory, McLachlan turning her attention away from the gritty Melbourne streets to the potential dramatic potential of a films set in a tech-heavy, militarized dystopian future.

A vocal advocate for women filmmakers, Kusama has consistently spoken passionately about the importance of diversity in the film industry. The success of Destroyer will no doubt continue to raise the visibility of the platform from which Kusama speaks, not only as an artist, but as a woman whose voice has been stifled so many times by a male-dominated industry who in the past have been so shamefully dismissive of the important things she has to tell us and of her extraordinarily skillful and creative way of telling them.

Released in the United States through IFC Films in mid-2018, Aislinn Clarke’s feature film debut The Devil’s Doorway is an extraordinary accomplishment for a number of reasons. The first feature-length horror movie directed by a woman in Northern Ireland, it is also one of the very rare feature-length found footage horror films directed by a woman.

With critics and audiences barely able to catch their breath after Mandy – the intoxicating delight that was Panos Cosmatos’s spectacular exercise in woman-centred world-building – Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds has shown that when it comes to the oft-cited Nicolas Cage renaissance, the actor has only just begun.

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"I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married" HRM Elizabeth I is on @AWFJ's #RealReelWomen List of women with true stories told in fiction films. Eight for QE1! View for #WomensHistoryMonth inspiration! Read @wozerina's engaging notes: https://t.co/nWXBctCgVg

"Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no wind" Queen Elizabeth I is on @AWFJ's #RealReelWomen List of women with true stories told in fiction films. View for #WomensHistoryMonth inspiration! https://t.co/lJmEmogQ5t

.@AWFJ's #MovieOfTheWeek is @Aliklay's @TheBrinkFilm, a scathing expose about political nfluencer #SteveBannon's incendiary international campaign of racism. rape culture in middle America. A must see for social responsibility https://t.co/yfWDqBrUpS